[Opengate-devel] Texture sizes

[eGore <eG...@gm...>]

Hi list!

Gray has started texturing the next ship. As he has done for the "Lady Kickstart" he uses very high quality textures. These are very good for renderings but that does not work out in the game. If you use the "Lady Kickstart" in game the frames per second drop immediately to a very low rate. This means that we can't use these textures in the game, sorry.

I don't want anyone to get this wrong, but we have to set up rules for the textures then. My recommendation ist:

1.) 1024x1024px for the ships. POW2-textures (multiple of 2) are very well handled even among older graphics cards. NPOW2 (anything not 2^n x 2^n) is only working for new cards or at least very bad at old ones (some strech the textures to a POW2 format, others use multiple POW2 textures to emulate a NPOW2. 1024x1024 should be enough detail for a ship. Otherwise we can think about 2028x2048 ... but 1 texture requiers ~132MB of video memory while the 1024x1024 "only" require ~33MB (all are uncompressed values).

2.) 256x256 (at most) for smaller objects like rockets, etc.

3.) U/V-Mapping must be used. The complete ship must have it's texture in a single U/V-Map. We already have these for 2 ships (ok, they both don't look great but that's a question of talent and not the tech).

4.) Multiple textures for better looking graphics: A good texture has 3 separate images:
* diffuse
* specular
* normal
A good example can be found here. http://img235.imageshack.us/img235/9421/splash01rl5.jpg

I hope I'm not stepping on anyones feet (especially you, Gary) but it won't work out any other way.

Regards,
  Christoph
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